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Did you know that there are two versions of Azure? Yes; and they are completely different. There are also some situations and solutions that you now take for granted and will not be available to you. In this article, I’ll explain why Azure’s left brain is not talking to its right brain.
Microsoft Azure evolved into something new last year. You might not have known, but when you worked with resources in Azure, you were working with the Service Management model, also known as V1. If you worked with virtual machines in this classic deployment, then you created a virtual machine on a virtual network. A cloud service, with optional load balancing, provided a public IP address that you could implement NAT-style endpoints with.
A classic Service Management virtual machine deployment (Image Credit: Microsoft)
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A virtual machine deployment using Azure Resource Manager (Image Credit: Microsoft)
The other big differences affect management:
Note that if you are using the new Azure Portal, then Service Management components will appear under different blades. For example ARM virtual machines appear in a blade called Virtual Machines, and Service Management virtual machines appear in a blade called Virtual Machines (Classic).
How you purchase Azure will affect what models of Azure are available to you. You will have both Service Management and ARM if you acquire Azure via:
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However, Microsoft has been making a big push on a new cloud sales and distribution channel called Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) since the WPC 2015 (Worldwide Partner Conference in July) of last year. This channel allows selected large resellers and distributors to resell Azure to customers and smaller resellers with monthly post-usage billing. This channel has proven to be very interesting to Microsoft partners, but there’s a catch with Azure; Azure in CSP does not support Service Management. This means that solutions that require, or might require at a later time, features are not in ARM or that are too hard to implement in ARM without a UI will not be suitable or CSP.
It is very early days for ARM, but I like what Microsoft wants to do. The potential to create complex solutions from templates really does simplify and accelerate deployment. It’s going to be at least five months before we have feature parity with Service Management, so those customers that are building IaaS (infrastructure) solutions probably should stick with Service Management for now. I also hope that Microsoft deals with some of the deployment complexity; the older interfaces in the Management Portal for VPN, endpoints, and availability sets are much easier to use and more reliable that their equivalent in ARM/Azure Portal. But eventually, I think Microsoft will get things right with ARM, and I’ll be happy to switch over at that time.
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